It's not much of a title, is it? It sounds like something you would call a sporting compilation – Pain and Glory: An Accrington Stanley Season Review 1997-98 – rather than a, presumably semi-autobiographical, study of a filmmaker in a creative crisis.

The latest film by Almodóvar centres on Salvador Mallo (Banderas), a big name film director who isn't working on anything at the moment, suffers from acute back pain and, after meeting up with an actor he fell out with at the beginning of his career, is dabbling with heroin. It relieves the pain, but quickly gets to be terribly more-ish. Intercut with these are flashbacks to his childhood, his mother (Cruz) and growing up in poverty.

Well, it ain't no 8½. Generally, the big-name film director making a film about the stresses of film making will emphasise the wild craziness of the process. Almodóvar doesn't stick his director alter ego in a circus ring; he places him inside a coffee table book. Pain and Glory is impeccably tasteful. All the sets are marvels of discernment. Everything is just so, pristine but not showy. Hidden away in his apartment, Mallo may live in almost constant agony, but you'd have thought the marvels of his interior design would have gone some way to easing his suffering.

Almodóvar is pure class. After the aberration of his previous film I'm So Excited, he's back to the kind of form that has made him one Europe's most acclaimed, and most popular, filmmakers. The performances are all top-notch, but Banderas excels. It's all in the eyes. In the scenes where he is stoned, they cloud over in a way that will remind you of every drunk bore you have ever been cornered by at a party.

It's a perfect piece of film making but somehow bloodless. Of course, it's not 8½; if his films are anything to go by a twenty-first-century Almodovar film set must be a place of calm and restraint. He's come a long way from the messy films of his youth. Everything seems real and human, emotions are believably portrayed, but it all stays up there on the screen, it doesn't reach out to you.